Old Fashioned Novels

"I have a theory about Mr. Kates. He talks the way people talked before he was born, therefore he must read old-fashioned novels."
Phoebe Gunther, in The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout

That's always been one of those quotes that stuck with me. All of my life, but particularly as a teenager, others have commented on the way I speak. Whether it was the kid in my history class asking how long it had been since I came to NYC from the south, or the random people who have thought I was English. This despite the fact that I am a native New Yorker. They didn't ask me these things because I had the accent for one place or the other, but because I used words, and methods of speech that seemed unusual to them. The strange becomes the foreign. And I do speak differently than a lot of people. I use big words, often anachronistic ones, and I use old fashioned turns of phrase.

I have this on my mind because I recently learned about the Virginia Quarterly Review young reviewer contest. I was tempted by it, and I thought I might try to write up a quick review. This in spite of the fact that I don't really like book reviews. Then I ran into a snag. They require that the book have been published after January 1, 2008. I have finished 72 books so far this year, and I am currently reading four more. None of them meets that qualification.

Even so, I have been making an effort to bring myself more up-to-date with my reading choice. I've been reading Murakami, Chabon, Junot Diaz, and Ha Jin. All of whom have written fairly recently, but I've not read anything by them that qualifies. I'm handicapped by my dislike of carrying bulky hardbacks around. I prefer trades. I was excited about Yiddish Policeman's Union from the moment that I first learned about it, but I only read it this year, because I waited for it to come out in paperback.

Of course, I've also backslid into my comfort zone, I've read a bunch of Graham Greene, with G.K. Chesterton, John Buchan, and Isaac Bashevis Singer mixed in*. Not to mention reread a number of Rex Stout novels, including the one quoted above.

Realizing that I haven't even read anything that qualifies for this contest, I'm now determined to do so. The question is, what will I read?

This is made even more difficult by the further stipulation in the contest rules:

Please keep in mind the readership of VQR and the type of reviews we publish. We will be looking not only to see if the style of the writing will appeal to our readers but also whether the book reviewed will appeal.

So now I've skimmed the descriptions of the last few issues, this seems even tougher. I shall have to do some real bookstore browsing to come up with something good. Any recommendations?

*one of these things is not like the other...

Friday Five

It's time once again for the Friday Five.

- Ha Jin's War Trash - This is a fictional memoir of the Korean War, told by an old Chinese man as he prepares to go to the USA for the first time to visit his family. It's an amazing work. You get a very different perspective on the Korean War than the American one. Particularly as our main source of perspective is M*A*S*H, both the movie and the show. I read this in 2006 and since then Ha Jin has become one of my favorite authors.

- Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga - So, like most Americans, you probably read Ender's Game sometime in your teens, then you picked up some of the Ender books, and the drop off in quality from one to the next knocked your socks off. That's ok, it happens to everyone. There used to be a time when he wrote in worlds other than that of Ender's Game, and he didn't go and rehash the same story over and over again, each time damaging the credibility of the more successful book he wrote before. It's hard to believe, but it's true. This is one of the prime examples, halfway between a collection of short stories on a single theme and a novel, this book is about world building, and attempts to understand what would happen to humanity if we really did have colonies on other planets.

- Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett wrote some of the best American detective fiction, in my opinion even better than Raymond Chandler, and this is one of his best. It's not quite as grim as some of the others, like The Maltese Falcon, which is also superb, but it's a lot of fun. It also resulted in some of the best movies ever, the William Powell and Myrna Loy Thin Man movies, though the first movie borrows the plot from the book, they are otherwise quite different in feel from the book. Still both are good. Read the book, then watch the movies and come back and tell me I'm wrong (or that I'm right, which would be preferable).

- Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America - First, Shorto is an excellent choice to have written this, history, even history as fascinating as that of my beloved New York City, can be very dry, and Shorto does an excellent job keeping the reader interested. Also, New York City is a fascinating place, and Shorto's thesis that the culture of the city is connected to it's early Dutch roots is very interesting. It's filled with engaging descriptions of New Amsterdam, tiny frontier settlement, frustrated democracy, and haven to pirates.

- William Logan's Macbeth in Venice. Read poetry! It tastes great and it's good for you! William Logan is somewhat better known as a viciously acerbic poetry critic. He also, in my opinion, writes poetry well enough to give him some pretty firm ground from which to be acerbic. I'm just going to repeat that word because I like it, acerbic. Not that the poetry is particularly harsh, it's just beautiful.